From the pages of History.

Abstract

Anaesthesia has been called as physiology in action. The development of anaesthetic agents and apparatus has dominated the discussion of development of anaesthesia. Yandell Henderson and Ralph Waters were the early proponents of the importance of physiology in anaesthesia1. Ralph Waters, who created the first academic department of anesthesiology in Wisconsin in 1927, was of the opinion that understanding the science was necessary for competency in the field of medicine. John Snow, called the first and greatest anaesthetist by Waters, was the first to do preoperative examination to understand the physiology of his patient. Yandell Henderson who was called the father of applied physiology had quoted that “Physiologists now and in the next few years will find their richest and most fruitful problems in the field of clinical, rather than in that of purely abstract, physiology... development of clinical physiology might well be the greatest event in the progress of medicine during the second de-cade of the twentieth century1.”